frax

Posted 19 September 2007 - 09:23 AM

Rudy, that link was gorgeous. Charles - I have never used CAD, and I know very little about it. I was thinking that SketchUp might be one avenue to approach this, if one doesn't do it straight up in Illy (the hard way).

Re: CAD - do people use it to draw things like this from scratch, without getting models to work with?

Charles Syrett

Posted 19 September 2007 - 10:44 AM

Charles Syrett

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I haven't used CAD very much, and I know there are other posters here who have -- but my limited experience has shown me that CAD "thinks" differently from illustration software. It *builds*, and then renders, rather than draws. If you start working with CAD as an artist, you may be looking at a steep learning curve, and you may be frustrated (for a while) at what may appear to be very limited drawing tools and capabilities. Yet obviously very eye-popping graphics can be done with CAD!

rudy

Posted 19 September 2007 - 10:58 AM

rudy

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With CAD it is easier than with a graphics package to do 3-D drawings, render them and spin them about until you find the right perspective. I believe the 3D capability is standard in CAD packages now.

Sky Schemer

Posted 19 September 2007 - 01:37 PM

Sky Schemer

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I've done a small bit of modeling and rendering in CAD. As Charles points out, it would be a very frustrating experience to go from art illustration to CAD, since the latter is built around exact measurements and precision. Google Sketch-up (and whatever it was called before Google acquired it) is bridging that gap by offering many of the CAD capabilities without the need for exactness. There have been other products to do that for years, of course, but they have been cost-prohibitive (and get more expensive over time, not less, as seems to be the "rule of software"), where as Sketch-up is accessible to the casual user. CAD can be fun, but it is definitely its own animal.

When you add ray tracing and radiosity models to the rendering engine, you can get some amazing, photo-realistic effects. Attached are three images. The first is a daylight-rendering I did using AutoCAD and lit in Lightscape (back when Lightscape still existed and was an affordable product), showing proposed remodeling for our den which is now a home office space. Note that I modeled sunlight coming through the windows, but did not give the "outside" a color so it looks a little funny, but it was good enough to give us a feel for how the room would look. The second is a night-time/indoor-lighting rendering of the same space (a lot smaller...sorry). The last is a photo of the finished room from about the same angle, albeit taken during the day so the lighting was different from the render.

I don't have an opportunity to do this stuff often since I don't work in any CAD related field, but it's a fine hobby.